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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28380888">TRUTH SLIPS FROM YOUR FINGERS LIKE QUICKSILVER</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastards/pseuds/bastards'>bastards</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Monster Hunter (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Gen, author fell in love with a character with no story whatsoever (sorry)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:49:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,868</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28380888</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastards/pseuds/bastards</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>All she can think about is how carefully the gods must have shaped the world, to hold it gentle and craft it so full of awful beautiful things.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>TRUTH SLIPS FROM YOUR FINGERS LIKE QUICKSILVER</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythtr/gifts">jaythtr</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>happy (very very belated) birthday yu!!! </p><p>i love you so much i wrote a study about a character that has no lore. also i know nothing about her (and still fell in love with her in the process).</p><p>apologies for any lore/canon errors, i've never played mhw and am basing this purely off of the wiki page.</p><p>cw for brief mentions of blood, fire/burns, scars, drug addiction, and a rather loveless birth family. (she finds love though, i promise.)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s always been too curious for her own good. </p><p>When she was a child, there was a patch of forest behind her house. Although her father wanted her to stay inside and learn, to absorb as much as she could as all young girls were supposed to do at her age, and her mother warned her never to venture too far, the trees beckoned to her. Tall, towering, bark rough-hewn and worn with age, the branches curled inward, pointing into the deep woods.</p><p>She stumbles in, a path seeming to open for her. The sunlight streams through the canopy, throwing the forest floor into dappled golden light and deep shadows. Bugs scuttle around her feet, climbing over rotting logs and undergrowth. </p><p>She’s not sure how long she’s been walking at this point. All she knows is that she stands in front of a dark, strong tree trunk. There’s moss strewn over the wood, plush and jewel-green. She reaches out a hand to touch, and the surface is kind to her fingertips. Tilting her head back, she finds sprawling branches framed against a dark blue sky.</p><p>
  <em> Dark blue? </em>
</p><p>That’s when she hears the yelling. It’s faint, but she thinks it may be her mother. It’s dark. She’s young and scared of what she does not know, so she starts running. The forest, once welcoming and inviting, now feels like it’s caging her in. Tears start to streak down her face. Where did the wonder go? The trees close in around her. </p><p>She can see the light of her home ahead of her. It’s almost suffocating now. A branch cuts across her cheek, and she can feel the sting of it, the gentle drip of blood mixing with the salty tears dotting her cheeks. With a final stumble, she bursts through the last line of leaves and straight into her mother’s arms.</p><p>Now, you would think she would never venture into that forest again, wouldn’t you? That she would sit at home, complacent, vowing never to return?</p><p>The first thing she does is dig through her father’s chest of treasures, frantically rifling through the jumble of riches, coins and precious metals strewn haphazardly within the wooden chest. There are necklaces and rings and strings of pearls and every kind of jewel known to man, but she does not find what she’s looking for.</p><p>She could not find the color of the moss, that wonderful shade of vibrant green.</p><p>The second thing she does is she formulates a plan to go back into that forest. No matter what her parents say, she wants to wander through the trees, discover what secrets their sprawling branches hold close.</p><p>She’s young and scared of what she does not know, so she vows to know it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Winding the bandages around her arms is routine.</p><p>Honestly, the burns are basically healed at this point. All that’s left is patches of discolored skin and scar tissue. There’s really no need for the bandages, but she finds it almost calming to see her imperfections being covered up by bright, sterile strips of white.</p><p>She turns her hands over, examines the palms, then the backs. They’re callused, small pale scars littering her skin, but they were untouched by the flames.</p><p>She has a habit of asking for fieldwork. Although a lot of her colleagues love to work in the labs, analyzing samples and coming up with concrete results, she far prefers to spend her time in nature. </p><p>Sometimes, she wonders if this is what kept her from being like her father. He was a politician. When faced with the burden of power, men like him grow dependent on rather illicit substances to unwind. She supposes she should be happy. The worst crime he committed was neglecting her, their family, although she’s not sure she can blame that on the drugs. </p><p>Her father was a loveless man, so she found love in other places.</p><p>Namely, the warmth of sunshine on her face. The way her footsteps land muted on a mossy forest floor. How fine-grained sand slips, quick and fluid, through her fingers.</p><p>The expedition was standard, her field team trekking through a flat plateau. The landscape was barren, pockmarked with brush and small, leafless shrubs.</p><p>She supposes she should’ve been more careful. The air was dry, stifling and hot, and she vaguely recalls a warning about the plants scattered around the hard-packed dirt. <em> As long as you’re cautious, you should be able to collect samples without being—. </em> Her memory of her superior’s words cut off there.</p><p>She walks over to one of the shrubs, crouching down to examine it. Small, red berries linger on the branches. Fascinated by <em>how exactly </em>these fruit were growing on the barren branches, she doesn’t notice the way the air heats up around the plant.</p><p>Doesn’t hear her team yelling at her to get back.</p><p>Doesn’t realize. Until there’s sudden, searing pain on her forearms and her eyes are watering from the smoke and she is jumping back, gazing in reverence as the bush lights up, flames licking along the branches and turning them to ash.</p><p>Right. <em>As long as you're cautious, you should be able to collect samples without being burnt</em>. But in her pain-addled mind, all she can think about is how carefully the gods must have shaped the world, to hold it gentle and craft it so full of awful beautiful things.</p><p>Eyes glinting and teeth flashing, she throws her head back and laughs unhinged, a big <em> fuck you </em>to her own need for knowledge and whatever truth she was trying to find, before she crumples to the ground, unconscious.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Now, she laughs, but it’s a soft chuckle at the memory as she secures the strips of cloth around her left wrist. She starts on her hair next, nimble fingers braiding and pinning her hair back on the crown of her head. She’s found it’s <em>good </em>to keep that sense of routine, to keep familiar actions and ground herself even if everything around her is completely different.</p><p>Her new home is gorgeous. It’s odd, technically being aboveground but knowing that her surroundings are underwater. That if she takes one step outside the building, she’s instantly submerged. Huge, bright-colored branches of coral arch above her head, and sunlight filters weak and warbly through the water.</p><p>She leapt at the opportunity to work here. Obviously, fleet master was insanely prestigious, even more so for her young age. (Sometimes, she thinks about whether her parents would be proud of her. She tries to move past it.)</p><p>If she’s being completely honest though, it was more about the environment than anything. She’s never explored somewhere as uniquely wondrous as the coral highlands. Everything is so surreal, feels like it shouldn’t be possible. Like gravity has been altered, specifically for her. </p><p>Also, it’s nice that there <em>can </em>be no fire when she’s fully submerged. That there are no more nightmares of searing pain, suffocating smoke.</p><p>Sometimes, she doesn’t think she should need a complete change of environment, that she doesn’t deserve to be traumatized from something that didn’t even permanently hurt her. Sometimes, she thinks that she’s <em>weak</em>.</p><p>(You see, it’s rather difficult to break free from the hold of ideas that are not yours. But she’s trying.)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Honestly, she’s surprised that she hasn’t told anyone about the story behind the bandages wrapping around her arms. No one’s bothered to ask yet.</p><p>She knows that she’s intimidating. Even her own brother has admitted that she “can be rather unsettling sometimes”. She knows that she rarely smiles, and when she does, it’s slightly too sharp. Really, everything about her is slightly too sharp, down to her narrow eyes and the meticulous way she pins up her hair.</p><p>The first time a student arrives at her research facility, it’s <em>difficult</em>, to say the least. No matter how hard she tried, he never talked to her, preferring to eat meals quickly and spend time around her younger staff. She knows it wasn’t her fault, that she tried her best, but she curses her appearance and her cold, calculated air and everything that made him leave as quick as possible the instant the month ended.</p><p>She knows she just needs to give it time, for connections to blossom into something within her grasp, but she fears being untouchable. (For when you’re untouchable, you become unable to touch.)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>When the hunter refuses to give her their name, she grins and takes it in stride. She’s met plenty odder characters than someone who will only be referred to as “hunter”. The desire to be able to fade into anonymity once they were done is something that she can respect, even appreciate. Their handler has a name though. Anna. The name rolls off her tongue oh so easily and when she looks into Anna’s eyes, she can see a piece of her younger self. That unquenchable thirst for knowledge, to dig her fingers into the crevices of the world and crack open every last secret that the universe hides from her. </p><p>She warms to the both of them immediately. Although their paths don’t cross often, she often sees them running around and shouting at each other, scrambling for supplies in the base and foraging outside. She chuckles to herself, nostalgia washing over her like the soft saltwater breeze.</p><p>She would help them, but the duo seemed self-sufficient enough, navigating the highlands and the base like they had been there for years and years instead of mere days. (They had plenty of extra hands anyway, eager to disrupt the colorful monotony of the highlands.)</p><p>When she wasn’t writing reports or doing experiments or locked in her own head, she was spending time with them. Her crew.  They sit around a sturdy mahogany table in the evenings, discussing new findings over dinner. They bounce ideas off of each other, launch each other into tangents and it’s raucous and rowdy and she wouldn’t have it any other way. They play cards sometimes. It’s <em>technically </em>gambling, but for stupid things like extra dessert and the responsibility of doing the dishes. Her crew knows she’s soft and squishy on the inside, but they still complain about her being <em>scary</em>, her cold eyes and too-sharp smile giving her an impeccable poker face.</p><p>She hasn’t done the dishes since last year.</p><p>(It feels good to belong, to know that she’s welcome somewhere. That she’s more than a sharp mind and cold face, that she’s more than what <em>they</em> make her out to be.</p><p>That she has a family.)</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>If you asked her ten years ago what the end of her work was, she would’ve told you <em>finding the truth</em>. After all, her entire life has been spent chasing after answers that she can’t quite see.</p><p>But she’s learned that truths dance away from your fingertips the way shadows in candlelight flicker along a wall. And that even if you think you’ve finally captured the elusive things, they just barely slip out of your grasp, like trying to cup water in the palms of your hands.</p><p>But she’s learned that there is <em>love </em>in her unceasing search for her truths. And once you reach them, then it would all be over.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i know this is so incredibly niche. so! thank you a little extra than usual for reading.</p><p>twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/oyakudon">oyakudon</a>, although fair warning i do not talk about monster hunter.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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